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Hour Of Penance

Review @ miniradman

This May Not Exceed the Boundaries of Technical Death Metal, but It’s Still Flawless...

Hour Of Penance, one of THE most popular technical death metal bands are back with their newest album Sedition. The album cover features an apocalyptic sight where a two headed colossal serpent is descending to Earth from a raging thunderstorm upon a city which obviously is in the need of more biology classes and there are bugs flying everywhere. Seems a little extreme right? You know that old proverb, “you cannot judge a book by its cover” yeah? Well forget it because it doesn't apply here because once you get past the intro to Sedition, you immediately are kicked in the ass by; intense drumming, complex riffs and super guttural mid ranged vocals. Two things came to my mind once I was greeted by the first song: first of all “yesss, they haven’t thrown away their brutality that I love oh so very much” and secondly, “this is gonna be one hell of an album!”

As I’ve briefly stated in the introduction, this is one of the best releases from Hour of Penance. They are one of the very few technical death metal bands out there today who actually…STILL MAKE TECHNICAL DEATH METAL. Every band out there, well, every new band out there seem to all have the same mindset which is to invent the fastest, most incoherent variation music that is humanly possible because after all, that’s what technical death metal is known for right? But I think it is good to still have bands like Hour of Penance who are there to tend our hunger for some good technical death because lately, people have been coming up with more and more retarded permutations of technical death metal. Bands like Viraemia, Rings of Saturn, Slaughterbox and Fleshgod Apocalypse are all great examples of this (yes ladies and gentlemen, I know that Hour of Penance and Fleshgod Apocalypse are related (sort of) but Hour of Penance doesn’t try to force classical music down the throats of metal fans). There is no orchestra in the background trying to get us to like Beethoven, there are no pig squeals to turn us off and there is no “retardation” of the music. Sedition is just technical death metal the way it was suppose to be and that’s definitely a good thing in my book. In fact, I’m still surprised that stuff like this still exists!

Many people in the world today think that the days of technical death metal are numbered and who can blame them, it hasn’t changed much since the earliest bands came to life. It’s still fast, it’s still brutal and of course… it’s still technical but I think that what turns people off is the redundancy of sheer brutality, technicality and speed. Most technical death metal albums sound like you’re just listening to the same track over and over again, constantly looking down at your I-pod to check whether or not it’s stuck on repeat (it’s no wonder why only a small portion of technical death metal bands have gone mainstream). When you think about it, technical death metal seems to be a very hollow genre. I’m not trying to say or even imply that Hour of Penance have changed everything or anything concerning the genre with Sedition, because they haven’t done that at all. What they have done however, is made technical death metal, less tedious to listen to. So slightly they’ve done it, but it seems to have uplifted the quality and intensity of the music. Each track has its own technical death metal persona to it, without it feeling like it’s not Hour of Penance or shouldn’t be part of this album.

The more I listen to Sedition, the more I realise how much I’ve always loved technical death metal. Dare I say it, but if anyone asked me to define modern day technical death metal I would point them to Sedition or at least Hour of Penance. This is THE technical death metal album, who cares if it doesn’t break any records for the fastest or most brutal album, who cares if their song writing isn’t the most complex, who cares if their music isn’t ground breaking in any way, who cares if they aren’t every technical death metal’s equivalent to Jesus… because I don’t. I would rather listen to awesome generic technical death over some tainted and contaminated piece of shit that someone had just so happens to call it technical death metal as one of the 150 genres it’s labelled as. I’m not going to go as far as saying that “oh, its technical death metal at its purest form” though, because that’s incorrect, but I will go as far as saying this is straight up technical death metal with no hidden surprises.

I think the highlight of Sedition is the variety of tempos they’ve used. Unlike many other bands who try to play so quickly as if they’re trying to make their tempo approach the speed of light or something, Hour of Penance play like the way we want them to play, technical but legible (well, really, they play the way they want to play… we just happen to like it). There are many tempo changes throughout this album, but they usually oscillate between; super duper quick, to super quick, to quick and relatively quick- there’s not much in the mid paced zone so click “X” on the top right corner, microwave and burn your computer right now if you’re looking for anything “mid paced” because you’re not going to find it here. Another thing that I feel complements the tempo changes are the change in atmosphere and backdrop throughout Sedition. Even though the band might be promoting evilness lyrically, it’s not all doom and gloom as far as the atmosphere is concerned. There are times where I even feel slightly uplifted by the guitar riffs. The only thing that is dark about this album, really, is the album cover and even that isn’t dark in comparison to what I’ve seen. I find that there is no sense of that kind of dark/heaviness/evil feeling present in Sedition but that’s what many death metal bands seem to pride themselves on (across all of its genres). That being said, Sedition is still worthwhile for all those people who are into that sort of thing.

Overall, Sedition is a pretty badass album which complements its badass cover. This is pretty much how I would define “good” technical death metal because it has everything that a tech death fan could want. The blast beats, awesome. The melody, beautiful. The song structure, amazing… Sedition is just the album I want in a technical death metal. The best part of this (but some may argue it’s what lets this album down) is that the music isn’t polluted by foreign styles of music like; jazz or classical, it’s just technical death. Like I’ve mentioned before however, there is nothing here that’s ground breaking, or anything that would “revolutionize” the genre. They’ve played hard, without the risk of going home. For anyone who wants to have a go at Sedition, be my guest because it’s a magnificent piece of work. I’d recommend any track for first time listeners but for those who are too afraid to make a decision, Deprave to Redeem is an alright place to start. To sum Sedition up in a nutshell, I’d say it’s flawless but not ground breaking. I give Hour of Penance’s album Sedition a 17/20.

Crinn - 31 March 2012: O.o these guys aren't anywhere NEAR being one of the most popular tech death bands! but they are amazing:3

Demogorefest - 01 April 2012: yeah, Hour of penance are pretty underrated compared to their younger, more successful (yet, less talented) brother, Fleshgod Apocalypse. I gotta say I'm on the same page as you as far as Sedition when compared to their last release, Paradogma, which was my favorite album of 2009. It was gonna be hard to top an album of that magnitude to begin with, but I found it kinda hard to hold interest in some of the new tracks (Cannibal gods and Fall of the servants especially) but overall this destroys the competition when compared to almost any death metal band out there today (I'm referring to YOU, spawn of possession)

Crinn - 01 April 2012: Make sure and read my review of The Vile Conception

Demogorefest - 01 April 2012: I was hoping to catch that tour in Chicago last Tuesday... Nobody had a ride up there so I ended up not going (and slipping into a slight depression afterwards). That's probably the best concert line up I've seen all year, sucks that almost all the dates are on the fuckin west coast though..

Crinn - 06 September 2012: oh hey, you repeat the word "doesn't" in the first paragraph.

Review @ Crinn

08 September 2012

18/20

If you want to know how I discovered Hour of Penance, read my review of The Vile Conception. Although I would highly recommend that you read that review first because it’s my favorite Hour of Penance record, it still will only minimally prepare you for the epic power of Sedition. For those of you Fleshgod Apocalypse fans that pretty much only listen to The Vile Conception because it features Fleshgod members on drums and vocals, you’d be surprised how much this band has stuck to their sound. And if there’s one thing that I know for sure, it’s that the Fleshgod drummer is one of the best and the fastest drummers of all-time. Of course, to Hour of Penance, settling for less was out of the question; so they went out and got a drummer that was fully capable of the speed and complexity of his predecessor, AND a vocalist (that’s so short he only goes up to my shoulders) that sounds maybe a little TOO much like Francesco.

For those of you that are familiar with the type of technicality played by bands like Fleshgod Apocalypse, Decapitated, and (obviously) Hour of Penance, don’t expect anything disappointing. The sound of Sedition is similar to the rest of the band’s discography, yet it gives off a vibe unlike no other. Most of Hour of Penance’s other albums have the same epic and explosive technicality, speed, and brutality. Sedition has all of that, but there’s just something about it that gives the listener a WHOLE different experience. But what I like (and a whole lot of other people like) about Sedition and Hour of Penance in general is that technical death can’t get any purer than what Hour of Penance plays.

I know that technical death has been around since the late 1980s (Atheist), but, let’s be honest, the genre didn’t explode until the late 1990s. We have the purely generic tech death bands (who oddly enough ALL sound different) like Decapitated, Neuraxis, and many others. Now my goal isn’t to degrade any bands here, but ever since the turn of the century, the technical death genre branched off into so many different variations in just…what…FIVE years? Maybe less?? It’s branched off into SO many different variations that what we consider to be GENERIC technical death metal is in fact not generic at all, it’s just a trend.

The same way how people are starting to consider “generic” deathcore to be deathcore bands that put 90% of their focus on BREAKDOWNS (thanks to two of the worst metal bands in history, Emmure and The Acacia Strain). People take bands like Emmure, Dr. Acula, and any other breakdown-focused band and put THEIR name on the “generic” label when they should be putting the REAL generic (not necessarily bad) deathcore bands under the generic label like Carnifex, Suicide Silence, Impending Doom, I Declare War, and Oceano. NOW, back to what I was talking about with technical death.

The technical death trend that has been placed under the GENERIC label is the stuff that has the most complexity possible; usually consisting of a lot of high-pitched guitar shredding and sweep picking. Although I will admit that I am a fan of a lot of those bands (one of them being one of my favorite bands EVER), it’s not the generic form of the technical death genre! People are taking bands like Origin, Rings of Saturn, Decrepit Birth, Brain Drill, Slaughterbox, and Spawn of Possession, and calling THEM generic. Bands like Decapitated, Necrophagist, and Hour of Penance play truly raw technical death metal.

The thing that’s UNIQUE about Hour of Penance is one of the things that makes Fleshgod Apocalypse unique. The drumming is so beyond brutal and technical that it can pretty much only be described as “insanity”. The song structure is fairly complex, but not overly complex. Hour of Penance always decides to create the base of the technical death sound and make it AS SOLID AS THEY POSSIBLY CAN, and then throw on a layer of insane drumming. After they do that, they don’t touch it; they leave it as is, raw, a bit unique, crisp, and pure. Seriously, there isn’t a single tech death fan out there than can deny the fact that Hour of Penance is not only one of the best, but also one of the only bands striving to keep the PURE and REAL sound of technical death alive and well. I mean, you can’t paint a picture unless you have paper to put it on. Hour of Penance is one of the best representations of the paper that everyone else builds on top of. I would give this album 18/20.